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Weighed down by our past: ‘Heavy: An American Memoir,’ by Kiese Laymon

Anita FelicelliDecember 17, 2018Updated: December 26, 2018, 1:45 pm

“Heavy” Photo: Scribner

In an interview published with the Paris Review in 1984, the novelist and essayist James Baldwin said, “When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.”

Even if Baldwin and Richard Wright weren’t expressly alluded to in Kiese Laymon’s third book, “Heavy: An American Memoir,” their influence is palpable. A compulsion to discover and reckon with what was most difficult about the author’s black boyhood in Mississippi animates the book.

“Heavy” is an intimate address from a son to a mother that begins, “I did not want to write to you. I wanted to write a lie.” The memoir Laymon wrote instead tells of growing up with his brilliant, hardworking divorced mother, a black political scientist who is committed to excellence for herself and her son, yet also takes him gambling when he’s 11.

Afterward, he lies on a pallet next to her and listens to her sleep: “Your snores reminded me that you were alive. If you were alive and next to me, I had everything in the world I could ever want.”

His grandmother raises him, too. Both women show him “how we didn’t even have to win for white folk to punish us. All we had to do was not lose the way they wanted us to.”

His mother loves him as deeply as he loves her, but she reacts to her terror of America’s racial violence by beating him. Knowing that society sanctions violence toward black people for the tiniest missteps, she is trying to discipline her son into perfection. This discipline extends to the life of the mind: She assigns him extra book reports, explaining that he has to be twice as good to get half as much, giving him “a black southern laboratory to work with words.”

The memoir progresses through Laymon’s early adulthood, including a transfer to Oberlin College and his time teaching at Vassar, before he returns home to Mississippi.

Laymon’s sentences carry a bone-deep crackle of authenticity. He writes to his mother, “Days, and often hours before you beat me, you touched me so gently. You told me you loved me. You called me your best friend. You forgave me for losing the key to the house. You coated the ashy cracks in my face with Vaseline slick palms. You used your nubby thumbs, wet with saliva, to clean the sleep out of my eyes. You made me feel like the most beautiful black boy in the history of Mississippi until you didn’t.”

Alongside the heartbreak of these rhythmic, sensual sentences is a forceful, declarative honesty. Here, too, is the conjuring of what it might be like to be inside another body, a conjuring that characterized Laymon’s searing essay collection “How to Slowly Kill Yourselves and Others in America” and his time-travel novel, “Long Division.”

Kiese Laymon Photo: Scribner

Laymon explained in the introduction to his essay collection, “Instead of imagining standard ‘literary’ audiences, I knew that I wanted to question traditional literary fictive trajectory by writing to folks (or sensibilities) who don’t read for a living and those folks (or sensibilities) who are paid to read for a living, in everything I created.” Trying to join these audiences is also the project of “Heavy.”

“Heavy” delves into the violence of Laymon’s boyhood, but it also reveals scenes of powerlessness: watching older boys go into a room to “pull a train” on a 15-year-old black girl who is just hoping to swim in the deep end of the pool. An author less intent on a reckoning might have been content to bear witness. But Laymon is acutely aware of his own failures to see others’ complexities, as well as how his work ethic is complicated by his gambling addiction and struggles with weight.

Laymon’s memoir pulls back the surface of America’s stories about race, performing almost an inversion of “Between the World and Me,” Ta-Nehisi Coates’ eloquent direct address to his black son. If Coates discloses the vulnerability of black parents raising black boys, Laymon reveals the vulnerability of growing up as a black boy subject to not only society’s terror, but also intergenerational fears.

Laymon writes, “No one in our family — and very few folk in this nation — has any desire to reckon with the weight of where we’ve been, which means no one in our family — and very few folk in this nation — wants to be free.” Yet his own words are plainly born of a desire that is embodied, deep and stunning. This is a generous conversation about the weight of racism and the painful pressures placed on familial love. We’re lucky to eavesdrop.

HeavyAn American Memoir
By Kiese Laymon
(Scribner; 241 pages; $26)

Anita Felicelli

Anita Felicelli
Anita Felicelli’s writing has appeared in the Rumpus, Salon and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her debut collection of stories, “Love Songs for a Lost Continent,” will be published in October. Email: books@sfchronicle.com